The Fundamental Attribution Error

Question 1

What is attribution theory?

Answer 1

Concerned with how people make causal explanations for their own and others behaviour - how the perceiver uses information to arrive at explanations. understanding the causes and implications of events people see

Question 2

What did Fritz Heider believe?

Answer 2

People as intuitive scientists - want to find out casuality
understanding, predicting and controlling future behaviour
there are personal and impersonal causes - inside and out

Question 3

Who is Firtz Heider?

Answer 3

The major figure of the attribution theory

Question 4

What are the problems with personal vs impersonal causation?

Answer 4

The distinction between them isn’t as clear cut as people make it out to be

Question 5

Gilovich and Regan 1986 - dispositional vs situational attributions

Answer 5

Ppts kept a diary for a week and wrote down an event which happened each day. Had to indicate how important their personal characteristics were in producing the event and how important situational factors were. Two authors judged the events to be experiences or actions

events judged as actions - dispositional attributions are significantly higher

events judged as experiences - situational explanations are more prevenlant

Conclusion - if people carry out actions, seen as free will and intended

Question 6

What is the correspondent inference theory?

Answer 6

Concerned with the variables which are involved when people seek out information about dispositions from observed acts / the conditions which people make dispositional attributions of others

Question 7

What conditions affect if people make dispositional or situational attributions?

Answer 7

Choice - if you chose to do something, seen as disposition

Social desirability - may say things due to the situation

Social roles - when people say something in a social role, could be due to the situation

Question 8

Jones and Harris - attitude attribute paradigm

Answer 8

Participants were asked to read essays on Castro Cuba, student had written the essay based on:
a. you have to write a criticism
b. you have to write a defence
c. you can do what you want
puts then read the essays, asked to judge characteristics of target person and estimate true attitude

results:
choice - if they write pro, judge them to be more procastro than students who wrote anti
no choice - pro Castro still seen as having more pro Castro attitudes ,even though they had no choice

Question 9

What is the correspondence bias?

Answer 9

This is the tendency to draw inferences about a persons unique dispositions from behaviours that can clearly be explained by the situations in which they occur

Question 10

What is the fundamental attribution error?

Answer 10

The overestimation of personal or trait factors, underestimation of the situation

Question 11

Why does it happen?

Answer 11

Behaviour engulfs the field - don’t have the access to internal states, so make an inference based on their observable behaviour, believing it is due to the personality

Question 12

Who came up with the FAE?

Answer 12

Ross

Question 13

Quiz master and contestants study - Ross, Amabile and Steinmetz

Answer 13

Ppts randomly allocated to be either quizmasters or contenstens. quiz master made up 10 questions. Average correct answers was 4/10. quizmasters rated their own and contestants knowledge as similar but contestants saw themselves as well above average.

conclusion - committed the FAE, don’t take the situation into account

Question 14

What does Gilbert suggest?

Answer 14

When people understand others, they make judgements first due to disposition
judgements after this, take into account the situation (situational correction) - initial dispositional inference is more resource efficient, easy, quick whereas situation requires effort
so, increases in cognitive load can undermine situational correction - won’t bother

Question 15

What are the sequence of events that occurs when attribution is made?

Answer 15

Prior beliefs - situation perception - behaviour expectation - behaviour perception - dispositional inference - situational correction

But, things interfere such as high cog lod, time restrictions, mood

Question 16

Is the FAE influenced by mood?

Answer 16

Experiments show that positive mood increases and negative mood decreases correspondent inferences - positive mood leads to less systematic processing of info than negative - so less correction

Question 17

Causes of correspondence bias

Answer 17

Lack of awareness of situational constraints
unrealistic expectations for behaviour
inflated categorisations of behaviour
incomplete corrections of dispositional inferences
the salience bugaboo

Question 18

Do dispositional explanations relate to political attitudes?

Answer 18

Liberals - focus on situational

Conservatives - focus on personal explanations

Question 19

Is the FAE influenced by political attitudes?

Answer 19

Split up into liberal vs conservative
quiz master vs contestent design
ppts read a story about a quiz. contestant gets 1/5 correct. Asked how intelligent each of them are

Results:
liberals - no difference in intelligence, may situational correct
conservative - rate the contestant as less intelligent than the quizmaster

Question 20

What is the ideological script hypothesis?

Answer 20

Identifying oneself as liberal or conservative leads people to adopt different explanations for social problems - attributions are due to a specific political point rather than personality

Question 21

What are the biases in perceptions of situational correction?

Answer 21

People think that others are more prone to the correspondence bias than they are themselves - other people don’t situational correct, people see themselves as superior perceivers

Question 22

Example of people being biased in their perceptions of attribution patterns

Answer 22

Van Boven et al
Questionnaire, two dispositional factors and two situational factors. Asked to estimate how their classmates would rate each factor

own estimates - believe that they would make more situational correction than dispositional. Peers would make both situational and dispositional factors

Question 23

Are there cross cultural perspecives?

Answer 23

People from individualistic make dispositional factors

people from collectivist cultures make situational explanations of behaviour more

Question 24

Sabini’s arguments

Answer 24

Believed the FAE was all wrong
social psychologists have not shown that dispositions in general are less important than people believe them to be. They have shown that some dispositions are less important and other more important - avoiding embarrassment and saving face are very important

Question 25

What is embarrassment?

Answer 25

Feeling ashamed and uneasy

aversive emotional state in social interaction, wanting to flee from the social interaction

Question 26

What is face?

Answer 26

Refers to the positive aspects of character that a person claims to be - people are concerned with how others view them

Question 27

What is the face threatening act?

Answer 27

Ac act that suggests that someone is less worthy than their role requires them to be

Question 28

What is the problem with the FAE?

Answer 28

People underestimate the importance of specific factors - there is typically no answer to some questions

Question 29

Sabini’s view on Milgram

Answer 29

The findings could be interpreted as showing that the disposition to obey authority is stronger than the disposition to obey one’s conscience - their obedience was due to having a difficult time to confront the experimenter, people were embarrassed

we have got the dispositional factor wrong

Question 30

Sabini’s view on Asch

Answer 30

The reason people were wrong is because they didn’t want to look like fools (dispositional), they wanted to avoid embarrassment, not because of the situation

Question 31

Sabini’s view on Jones and Harris

Answer 31

Maybe their belief about being pro Castro or not was to do with what internal cause was active: the writers beliefs about Castro or a desire to please the political science instructor - so we underestimate the wish to obey the experimental instructions

Question 32

Responses to Sabini

Answer 32

The distinction between internal and external causes of behaviour is muddled
not easy to divide causality into external vs internal factors - concerns about face are important